


boy draws wings on everything.

by Misprinting (misprinting)



Series: check the headlines. [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Biphobia, Bisexual Character, F/M, First Time, Homophobia, M/M, Manipulation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Period-Typical Homophobia, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 15:08:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2392871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misprinting/pseuds/Misprinting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>God must be testing Steve, or else maybe Natasha is. </p>
<p>(Or: a long time ago, Steve loved a man and he loved a woman. Nothing much has changed.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	boy draws wings on everything.

**Author's Note:**

> (Mostly) Set after The Avengers and IM3, but before Thor 2 and Cap 2; roughly running up to the beginning of AoS (so expect it to sort-of-end somewhere around September 2013). Some sections are set before Cap 1 and one is set during Cap 2, though. Eh, look, I’m sorry, my timeline is fucked and maybe doesn’t make sense. (Except that it does, because I have a written out timeline of all relevant events between the 10th March 1917 and a point way past where this fic ends to make sure it does, so, go with me, I've got you.)
> 
> The title of this work (and everything to come in this verse, assuming the rest of this verse ever happens) comes from The National’s 29 Years, which is dumb because I actually can’t listen to it as I always expect it to be Slow Show and it continuing to not be distresses me. I’m a fucking moron.
> 
> This fic is the first of a four part verse, because of course it is; I am a dipshit. On that point: look, what's endgame for this verse is not necessarily what is endgame for this fic, if indeed anything is.
> 
> More notes on the tags/warnings in the end notes.

There was a time, not that long ago as far as no one except Steve is concerned, when a beautiful woman looking to spend time with Steve was the stuff of dreams. When it looked set to stay that way forever.

Funny how things change.

Natasha’s lying on the couch in the apartment he didn’t choose or furnish, wearing sweatpants he guesses are supposed to be his and a black shirt with a round yellow smilie face — X’s for eyes and its tongue sticking out — which is definitely hers. Her hair is wet and curling, she’s got her arms above her and is stretching out in a way that’s making it — well, okay, look, it’s making it really hard for Steve to be the guy his Ma brought up and not stare at either her chest or the soft skin of her belly where her shirt’s riding up. And she’s smiling at him, smiling in a way that’s trying very hard (and it’s nearly successful, don’t get him wrong) to leave him without the brain power to see how it’s not reaching her eyes.

He drops his bag in the doorway and says, “Uh, hi.”

“Howdy.” She stops stretching (thank god, Steve thinks with a sigh of relief he only realizes is audible from the glitter in her eyes) and her smile grows, her lips parting until it’s almost a grin. Steve thinks it _is_ genuinely a little bit fond. And he has a choice, here: he can smile cautiously and let her know he’s not relaxed, that he knows she’s got an angle, or he can relax into a grin and hope she follows suit. She tilts her head a fraction, watching him. He suddenly can’t help but think of her the second before she’d run at him to jump onto that Chitauri flying motorbike. It’s almost unconscious, how he relaxes and grins at the thought.

Her shoulders loosen in response, and, even though it’s barely a fraction of a movement, Steve will take it and run with it. He says, “It’s good to see you, Natasha,” and doesn’t even ask how she’d got in, or why she’s clearly taken a shower in Steve’s apartment before he’s even moved in himself — her wet towel’s airing on the back of a dining room chair on the other side of the room, — or if she’d always meant to be here, claiming his space, when he finally took up S.H.I.E.L.D’s offer of housing. If she’d known he’d be coming back to stay tonight — something Steve hadn’t told anyone, not even really himself, until this morning, hours ago, when he passed the turn for New York and realized it was time to stop running.

Hill had acted unsurprised and impatient to hear he was coming to DC to stay, and they — the collective S.H.I.E.L.D they — had obviously been waiting for him; the apartment’s testament to that. But he still doesn’t think he’d been expected 

“How was the road trip?” She asks. “Did you see the Grand Canyon? Bring back any souvenirs?”

Shucking his jacket and stretching out the kinks in his back, Steve takes a look around the apartment, noting history books on the shelves and the three best ways to get out in a hurry. He leans his shield against the wall before he leans himself against it, too. It’d been a long drive down from Boston; he’d planned his route around missing traffic getting into New York, not for passing it and heading the extra two hundred miles, plus change, to get him to DC.

(He feels like he’s pinged around the map like a snapped elastic band since he got unfrozen; feels unanchored, and he’d like to be, in a distant sort of way where he can’t imagine what that’d look like in this century. He’d stayed in New York for nearly two months after the invasion, staying at Tony’s (not with) and helping out with the cleanup wherever he could. DC had been the plan since before then, the endgame plan, since he first found out where Peggy was living. Following wherever Peggy went had been the plan since long before then, maybe even since the night with the red dress.

(Though maybe not. If the night with the red dress was the first of many nights spent in that particular bar, then maybe it was the last night he spent in it, once it was the husk he felt and he’d needed reorienting to a new true north with Bucky… well. Maybe then.)

The road trip around the circumference of the country had been accidental, though it had started with Peggy, too; a visit with her every day for two weeks in her house — her own house, then — on the outskirts of DC, before she politely told him to stop looking at her and seeing the whole worlds’ change in her face. Go visit Dugan’s grandbaby and great-grandkids in New Orleans, she’d said, and then on the way why not see Charlotte — where she put him in touch with Gabe’s great-nieces and nephews — and Memphis — no one’s relation, she just thinks it’s a shame he missed Elvis — and she’d been so good at not taking no for an answer that he’d been half-way to California before he’d thought about how this hadn’t been his idea at all. O n the same day he’d entered Texas she’d gone into residential care, and he’d also realized it was her way of protecting him from the reality of her age. For that, he wants to call her kind, cruel, and a lot of other names he was raised never to call a lady that mean, to him, everything in between.

But Peggy had called him back again, like he’s a moth to her flame. He needs to be there with her while she’s still flickering away, casting an impossible warmth, remembering with him.)

But. Anyway. He’s glad to be somewhere with heating, running hot water, and a bed, even if it doesn’t feel any more like home than the motels he’d stopped at on the way.

“Good, yes, and just the one,” he tells Natasha, in answer to her questions, and pulls out his keyring-penknife to show her. She takes it from him and starts flicking through each attachment with an eagerness that belies the exasperated look she gives him.

“There is a reason Stark calls you a boy scout, Rogers.”

Steve shrugs. “Stark’s more boy scout than any of us.” At her look, he says, “What, those suits don’t say ‘be prepared’ to you? If he didn’t he’d be long dead.” He bends to untie his boots and charitably ignores Natasha calling him an old man when it’s harder than usual to stand up from the crouch again. Instead, he asks if she’s hungry. His mother didn’t raise a boy who doesn’t know how to host. He heads off to see if S.H.I.E.L.D’s left him with any food in the kitchen cupboards and hears the soft pad of feet that says, first, that Natasha has followed him, and second that she’s letting him know. 

“Did you hear what happened in Malibu?” She asks, hopping up to sit on Steve’s new kitchen counter. The cupboards come up empty, which is actually surprising, but goes some way to proving Steve’s theory that S.H.I.E.L.D hadn’t known he was coming, even if Natasha somehow had. There are a bunch of menus for places that deliver in a drawer, though, so Steve fishes them out as he’s nodding to Natasha.

“I was in Yosemite when it all happened, but yeah; I swung back that way to check in after. Bruce was there, too. Tony was, y’know. Tony, but Pepper and Bruce had it handled.” He’s fished out three menus of the bunch and passes them to Natasha, saying, “You choose. The suits are all gone, though, d’you hear that? And he didn’t want to talk about it, but Pepper told me he’s thinking of having heart surgery, get rid of that battery in his chest.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow but nods, so Steve’s not sure if the surprise (if that’s what it is) is for Steve’s food choices or because she’d not known Tony’s plans. Steve suspects that’s exactly how she likes it. 

“Have you had Vietnamese food yet?” She asks, and, when he shakes his head, that’s the menu she passes him, though she does write down a string of numbers and tells him that’s what he should ask for, so he supposes she doesn’t leave him to entirely fend for himself.

And when he’s successfully ordered their food she grins and pats him on the cheek, which should be patronizing — it _is_ patronizing, — but Steve’s more concerned with the way she moves her hips as she walks away from him. And he knows this is some game she’s playing, that she’s got an objective here she isn’t letting him in on just yet, but that doesn’t stop him feeling every inch the inexperienced boy he absolutely is.

And if he also lets her get away with it because he likes her, and suddenly feels like a weight on his chest that he’s only just realized was loneliness has disappeared? Then he won’t tell her. It isn’t what she wants to hear.

**[ &]**

A long time ago, Bucky holds Steve’s shoulder and tells Steve it’s gonna be okay, that he can come stay at his and that he’ll look after him, and Steve wants to kiss his best friend on the lips and curl up under his chin, stay folded up under his hands, and never come out.

It’s not such a revelation; it’s been a long time coming, but it’s enough to make him pull away and stick it out on his own when he might have given in.

That lasts a month, until Mrs Barnes comes round to drop Steve off a stew of some kind — which he’ll eat because he loves her and it’s very kind and he’s really not rich enough to turn down food, even though her cooking is sort of notoriously godawful. She’s just putting it on Steve’s table and giving him instructions for heating it when she finds a note from his landlord threatening to evict him if he doesn’t cough up the extra rent he’s asking. Steve flushes and gives getting up on his high horse about it a go — not against her, he’d never speak _to_ her in anger, — but he tells her all about how he’d worked out the last rent agreement himself because his Ma was sick and so he knows his landlord’s got no right to be putting up the rent for another three months. Mrs Barnes folds the letter very properly and tells him, “Steve, just do my ears a favor and move in with us for a while, please. Just until you get things sorted, and save Bucky having to worry about you at me all day every day.”

“Mrs Barnes, please, I- I couldn’t-“ Steve is blushing furiously now, and is absolutely unable to stop from shuffling his feet like he’s seven and just been caught talking to Bucky at Mass.

She gives him a look that makes him stop, immediately, and hands him the letter. “Tear that up,” she tells him. “And pack your things. Come home with me now, Steve; your Ma would want us to look after you, and we will.”

She watches with a smile that’s pure Bucky as Steve tears up the letter into precise little squares (it’s more satisfying than he’d expected, and he knows she catches him smiling), and when they walk out of the door, she fits her hand in the crook of Steve’s elbow. She takes him home, feeds him godawful stew that he smiles at her over and compliments her on. She smiles back indulgently, with the confidence of a cook with no sense of taste. She kisses his forehead and presses his shirts and gets him a job in her Uncle’s shop. And he promises himself he’ll never kiss Bucky and risk losing all the family he’s got left.

Unfortunately, some things have a way of coming around even when you most try to avoid them.

**[ &]**

So far, Steve’s avoided living in the modern world. He’s lived in S.H.I.E.L.D’s custody, but that was a weird stepping stone between military life and some dreamed up version of the 1940s they’d created for him, with a little of the modern world thrown in for color. He’s travelled across the States and back again, doing the Great American Road Trip thing, apparently, though he hadn’t known it was a thing when he started — it’d reminded him of being in Europe, mainly, if less muddy, more lonely, and with usually less chance of getting shot at by Nazi’s — but traveling like that’s not living in the world either. Now he has an apartment in a new city, a new street. He shops for groceries twice a week, has all the hot water he wants and a TV to himself and a bank account and bills. 

It’s just, settling down is a lot to get used to. It’s not how he’d ever dreamt it might be. No Bucky; no Ma; Peggy’s in the home and he visits her often, but his first visit when he gets back she pulls him in for a kiss on the lips and pats his hand and tells her she’s too old for him, now, so he goes home to his empty apartment. He goes running every morning; looks at the people he passes and wonders what their lives are like, what their jobs are, if they’re also not going home to anyone after they’re done running.

Agent Hill gives Steve a week to settle into DC before she comes for him to discuss his options, as she says, though they both know she’s recruiting him to S.H.I.E.L.D whether he’s on board or off. He’s on, as it happens. Mostly because Peggy founded S.H.I.E.L.D, after all, and also because he needs some good to do; S.H.I.E.L.D’s good will have to be a start.

Fury seems to think it’s a hilarious idea to make Steve grow a beard and wear some glasses and join this year’s recruits in training while he and Hill get an idea of his capabilities and teach him some new tricks. Says it’ll help Steve get practical experience of espionage. Steve, whose face has been on the screens in Times Square and in the nations’ living rooms, and whose picture when he gets groceries is put on TMZ every other week, thinks Fury is full of shit, but that since the ability to not be recognized would be useful — and Natasha and Clint manage it just fine, so it is possible, — he goes along with it.

Everyone in his class knows who he is by the end of the first week — Steve’s just happy he holds out on less than ten of them knowing to the end of the first day, since it means he doesn’t have to give Natasha fifty bucks.

The training’s good, though. He learns fighting styles he’s never encountered, starts learning Mandarin and adding to his pathetic (so Natasha says) Russian, and goes through a technology bootcamp that mostly bores him to tears but sometimes makes him feel like the kid he’d been the first time he stepped inside a real art classroom. He does three months with the kids in his group and starts to feel more connected to the world he’s in than he has since New York.

Natasha helps, too, even as confusing as she is, as much on edge as she always puts Steve just with her presence, as much as he just wants to sit her down and ask, “Natasha, what do you want from me? Can’t we be friends?”

After that first week in DC when his apartment had remained empty and cold, she lets herself into his place a lot. And she’s always wearing his clothes, watching his TV, playing his records, eating his food. It’s like having a roommate, only no roommate he’s ever had — which, okay: his Ma, Bucky, and Bucky’s family — has been so… so low-level flirtatious all the damn time. She makes him make her this pasta sauce once, sitting on the counter while watching him do it like she’s the Queen of everything she sees, and when she tells him it’s probably done she gets him to bring a spoon of it to her. She pulls him in closer than he’s comfortable with, a hand around his wrist (he’s very aware of how much pain she could put him through if she just dug her fingers in, just there where her thumb is, and twisted), and holds eye contact with him while she tastes, licks her lips, and calls it delicious. He knows she’s laughing at him when he fumbles the spoon and makes an excuse to go to the restroom. But it’s things like that, things he probably could call her on if he’d been brought up in this century, but which, as it is, send him away blushing and confused and absolutely determined not to give in to her until he absolutely has to.

And there’s all the touching.

He’s lying on his couch, reading the internet, when she emerges from his bedroom one night. He doesn’t ask her if she’d been in there since before he got home or if she’d come in through the fire escape; frankly, he just doesn’t want to know. She’s wearing one of his sweaters, too big for her so it comes down to the middle of her thighs, and a pair of those tight leggings women wear now — not, Steve is aware, for the express purpose of making him blush and stammer and not know where to look, though it does sometimes feel like it. Natasha leans on the armrest above Steve and pokes at his forehead.

“Hey, Grumpy, what’ya reading?”

Steve bats her hand away and tells her he’s not grumpy, he’s concentrating, to which she grins — because he probably couldn’t have sounded more like he’s in a sulk if he tried — and calls him “Frowny” instead, bracketing his face with her hands to smooth her thumbs over his forehead, as if to straighten out creases in a shirt. His automatic reaction is to pretend he’s not blushing, no way, and look for some way out of her hold, but the feel of her cool hands on his skin disappears all but sparring tactics from his memory, and, since he doesn’t want to fight her, he just has to lie there under her power until she gets bored or finds some new way to torture him.

He’s not sure if it’s boredom or just curiosity that makes her let go of him to tilt his tablet up so she can see what he’s reading; her eyebrows go up and she pokes his forehead again, between his eyebrows. “Ah.”

It’s not exactly a good ‘ah.’

“It’s homework.” Steve explains, thumbing up to the top of the wiki article. “It was either this or reading up on McCarthyism. Figuring out what all the words you guys use for, er, sexuality mean is, y’know, confusing, but it’s less likely to make me break all my walls. I pay good rent here.”

That earns him a bit of a smile, though Natasha is still hovering somewhere between annoyed and wary. She takes his tablet off of him and bats at his legs to get him to move with more force than is strictly necessary, shifting him where she wants him until she’s invaded his space and is sitting back against his chest, head in the crook of his arm, his legs either side of her hips. She barely acknowledges him when she’s done — probably a good thing, just about, as Steve’s sure his flummoxed idiot expression is not only unattractive but exactly what she wants to see, and he might not be successfully fighting back against this weird, confusing, ridiculous game she’s playing, but he damned well wants to keep her from that knowledge for as long as he possibly can. He’s not sure if it’s a pride thing or a bullheaded thing, though he has a suspicion it’s just his not-overly developed survival instinct finally kicking in.

He sort of wants to die. He does want the couch to swallow him up and make him disappear. He also really likes it. (And hates it, because if she were just honest with him he doesn’t think this would be outside of the realms of possibility for them. Because… because it’s dumb, but he thinks they would make a good couple, maybe, in that really unsure way where he barely knows what being a couple is even like now but he’s still sure he’d be completely terrible at it unless his girl were happy to walk him through it step by step. He _is_ sure, though, that they’d be good friends, and he already knows they’re an excellent team, playing instinctively to each others’ strengths and trusting each others’ abilities faster than he’s ever known — he knows all that just from those few crazy hours in New York.

Problem is, it might be him that’s making it complicated. That’s what a part of his brain that sometimes sounds like Peggy and sometimes like Bucky and sometimes even like Gabe or Monty or Dum Dum or his Ma — not his conscience, not really, but maybe his common sense — that’s what it keeps telling him, and that Natasha is maybe just trying to test him, see if he really can keep it as simple as their dealings in New York had threatened.

He’s just not sure why.) 

Right now, with her body heat melting into his body, and god but her hair smelling so good, too, it’s just as much as he can do to focus when she gestures to the tablet and tells him, “Look, Rogers, you can do better than Wikipedia. Let me teach you how the internet really works.”

She takes him through a whole world of words; he wouldn’t remember it all if it weren’t for the serum having traded in his pretty good memory for a photographic one. She gives it to him so no-nonsense that she sounds just like Peggy, and if he says “huh” when she gets to the word bisexual, a little touch of wonder in his voice as he thinks of all the people in his life he’s ever wanted to hold (though, truly, there have only been three of them), she pauses and looks at him, but doesn’t ask him to explain himself to her. It’s kind, and he’s grateful.

Though she’s an impersonal teacher, he guesses from her reaction — as much as he can guess anything about Natasha, so it’s really not much more than an inkling — when he’d first brought it up that this is something personal to her. And for a second when she finishes explaining what pansexual means and tells him to order her some Chinese food because she’s hungry and that they’ll do Human Sexuality and Gender Identity 102 some other time, he considers asking why it’s personal. She pulls out of his arms, stretches, and goes to push him up, and he decides she doesn’t owe him that. Thinks maybe one day (maybe one day after he’s said it to Peggy, first, because if there’s one person left on this earth he might owe it to, it’s her), one day he’ll be able to say, “Natasha, my name is Steve Rogers and I am bisexual,” or at least “I’ve loved women and men, and I don’t see that changing,” and that maybe when he does she’ll return the favor — “Steve Rogers,” she’ll say, mocking him, “my name — today — is Natasha Romanov, and I…”

He orders Chinese food for the both of them, brings her a can of Vanilla Coke — a 24 pack had turned up in his fridge one day last week, and he tells her they’re godawful but brings her a glass with ice and lets her take up half a shelf in his fridge for them anyway — and a glass of OJ for himself, telling her she can choose the film even though she always does, and even though there’s a game on. She takes the Coke, pokes his forehead, and tells him, “Still frowny.”

“It’s a lot to think about.” He shrugs, sitting down and taking up more than his fair share of the couch, because if he doesn’t then she will, and groans when he sees she’s putting Step Up 4 on, again. (Which he wouldn’t mind so much if she didn’t point blank refuse to show him the others, no explanation but a stare and a flat-toned, “this is the best one. If I show you the others, you’ll get ideas.”)

Natasha tucks herself in next to him and says, “One day, when you’re less frowny over it, I’ll make you watch Queer as Folk.”

Steve doesn’t know what that means. Given that her grin is absolutely evil, though, he’s sure it’ll be embarrassing for him from beginning to end, and that she’ll love every vindictive second.

**[ &]**

A long time ago, things are going great. Steve has a job he’s good at, (he might not be in love with it, but he has made friends with little old ladies on maybe every street in Brooklyn) is living with people who consider him family, and, the best part, sees Bucky every day. They’re back to living in each others’ pockets like when they were kids, and it’s comfortable and safe and Steve is very close to happy.

The thing he does want more of is privacy. Any kind of privacy. Five minutes of quiet. He always feels like he has to be helping as soon as he’s back from work, and though Mrs Barnes never lets him do anything too strenuous, that just means it’s stuff that leaves Steve a prospect for conversation. With everyone. And Steve loves them all, he really does, they’re sort of his guardian angels, but it’s very different to what it was like growing up with Ma at home, where quiet was plentiful, privacy was in abundance, and love was there in words carefully spoken and calmly said. There’s a lot of shouting in Bucky’s family. He’s always loved the cacophony of Bucky’s place, and they’ve always been good about his medically terrible hearing without making a big deal about it, but by the end of the first day he’s realizing just how much he loves a bit of peace, too.

(Steve tries not to laugh when Bucky’s Grandma comes over for dinner and complains about just that, how none of them ever shut up, right before half-shouting an argument with her son and Bucky’s oldest younger sister over the potatoes that drowns out the rest of the noise all together. She doesn’t see the irony.)

Steve takes to heading to the park between the shop and home for half an hour before heading back, most nights. Sometimes he walks around it, when it’s cold and he knows what his Ma (or Bucky, or Bucky’s Ma, for that matter) would say about him being out for longer than he ought in the cold. But mostly he sketches. He sketches all the time at home, too; the girls make a game of it where they point at an apple or at the couch and they tell him to “make it a castle with a dragon inside,” and he draws it like he thinks they want to see it. Or he sketches Mrs Barnes cooking, or Mr Barnes asleep with his youngest daughter drawing patterns on the palm of his hand with her finger over and over.

In the park, he sketches Bucky. Or, really, it’s not always Bucky — it’s not even always a man — but when it’s not Bucky they might have a face but Steve can never get their eyes right, or maybe with this lady it’s her smile. He always feels like they shouldn’t be smiling. He maybe thinks he doesn’t deserve to see them smiling, these people he’s lusting after, even the ones he draws.

They’re pornographic drawings, see. Though the women always have clothes on; how could they not? And mostly it’s arms, hands; two male hands caressing, clasped over someone’s cheek. Or chests, hips, sometimes legs. They’re not so indecent. He can’t even draw two men kissing; he tried, and what came out might as well have been the castle with the dragon inside for how much it doesn’t look like a kiss from love. He always crumples them up and rips them apart before scattering them piece by piece on his way home, but occasionally he carries them with him in his back pocket for a while, unripped, feeling like whichever particular picture it is is burning through his pants the whole time, until he chickens out and burns it on the fire while no one’s watching.

And every time he starts out telling himself he’s going to draw the pigeons or the tree or the kids racing each other to the wall. He has good intentions. But he figures, hey, it’s a lesser sin than acting on his lust, and he goes to confession every week and does his penance like a good Catholic boy. He can’t make himself stop, feels awful about it, but at least he still hasn’t kissed Bucky.

But he’s maybe got the divine retribution coming when one day Mrs Barnes comes to him and tells him, Ruth found this, and holds out the picture he’d drawn that day, the one he’d slipped in his jacket pocket and for the first time — God, fuck — forgotten about. It’s two men, shirtless, hands touching, faceless but for lips which brush each others’ check and temple. Tells him, “I’ll pray for God to forgive you, Steve,” as her hands shake and eyes fill with water about to break any second. Her voice is like steel. Tells him, “You can’t stay with us any longer. I’m sorry.” And then, as an unfinished afterthought, maybe even an explanation, says, “the girls… I just can’t-” and breaks off before leaving him alone. She leaves the drawing with him, and tells him he can stay the night and that’s that.

He doesn’t stay. Which is a stupid thing to do, in practical terms, since he’s barely got two spare dimes to rub together, but he cannot be in that flat for a second longer than it takes to gather his things and make up the bed he’s been sharing with Bucky. He stops at the kitchen doorway on his way out and says to Mrs Barnes’s back, “thank you for your kindness, Mrs Barnes,” and he wants her to run after him, hold him, tell him she forgives him. She doesn’t.

With the little money he’s saved from the job he’s not sure he’ll still have tomorrow, Steve gets a bed at the Y for the night and sleeps fitfully across from a guy who snores like a train and smells like socks. 

The next morning, he finds he does still have a job. Unsure how long that’ll last, if Mrs Barnes will turn up at lunch to tell her Uncle that he’s a pervert and he’ll lose this, too, Steve doesn’t want to piss any off Bucky’s relatives off any more than he already has and so decides against asking for time off to look for somewhere to live; he can stay at the Y a good while longer if he has to, for all it’ll eat into his money for medicine, and he’d noticed someone was looking for a roommate on the noticeboard there. 

He’s taking their inventory while the shop is mercifully quiet — he’s struggling to be the nice young boy his old ladies love today — when the shop door opens and he looks up to find Bucky standing in the doorway. Bucky is pale and windswept and beautiful, and so obviously put together in a hurry that Steve wants to pull him over, close, and tuck his shirt in properly, straighten his collar, flatten his hair. Steve stares and Bucky stares back, breaks into a grin, and strides across the shop to pulls Steve into a firm hug, his relieved sigh sending a shiver across Steve’s skin where it connects.

“Thought you’d have gone to ground,” Bucky tells him, pulling back. “You idiot, Steve Rogers, what were you thinking, leaving last night when Ma told you to stay one more?”

Steve pulls away, blanching, because surely Bucky knows, and while he’s glad Bucky doesn’t think anything of pulling Steve into a hug — though, really, the relief of that won’t sink in for another two days — he’d hoped Bucky’d know him better than to think he’d be able to stay in that flat with people he loved hating him. With them knowing of his sin and pitying him for it. Bucky looks at him, eyes turning all sad like they do when Steve’s sick. Steve doesn’t think he can take it.

“Steve, about what happened with my family-“

“Could we just-“ Steve finds himself saying, and then hangs his head because as if he’s got the right to ask. But he continues, “Not. Please let’s just not talk about it. I’m just so sorry, Buck.”

“God, Stevie.” Bucky pushes his hair back from his face, looking at Steve kind of hopelessly. “Sure, we don’t have to talk about it.” He tries a grin on for size — it’s too big, unnatural — and says to Steve, “hey, pal, let’s look at this like an opportunity, okay. Let’s get our own place, just you and me. C’mon. Yeah?”

“You-“ Steve looks like a gobsmacked fool, he knows, just from the way looking at him is making Bucky’s grin turn real. “You wanna- Buck, what- what about your family, they’ll-”

“Eh,” Bucky says, as he waves a hand like they mean that much to him, when Steve knows they’re Bucky’s world. “C’mon, you think I want to live there until I get married? I love ‘em, but Jesus Christ, Steve, they’re loud and annoying and if I move out I think I’ll like them a whole lot better than I do right now.”

Steve knows he’s still looking like a pale, confused idiot when Bucky sobers and straightens up, putting a hand on Steve’s shoulder. Steve’s brain is too fried to think about kissing him, or maybe he’s just focused too much on Bucky’s eyes when he says, “I love my family, Steve, but I love you, too, and neither you or them could make me choose between you.”

Steve’s Ma had once told Bucky’s, over the heads of their boys, that Bucky’s eyes were honest, an honest blue, and looking back Steve supposes it’d been a joke about how Bucky came by those blue eyes honestly, from both his blue eyed parents, even though he was the only brown haired child in a family of Irish red-heads. But Steve — at the time maybe as young as six, seven — he’d thought his Ma had meant it literally, and even when Bucky was lying through his teeth to his Ma or to Steve’s, when he looked at Steve, his eyes were honest blue, always.

And Steve doesn’t know how to say any of the things tumbling round his head, so instead he looks into Bucky’s eyes, his honest blue eyes, and smiles, still a part of him waiting for Bucky to say, “actually, you know, I made a mistake, I can’t live with a queer after all.” Steve doesn’t deserve his best friend, because Bucky just smiles back, pulls Steve in for a hug around the shoulders, and says, “That’s a yes, right? I know that face.”

_You do_ , Steve wants to say. _You know it better than anyone._

They live together right up to the war. Never once do they talk about why Steve doesn’t see Bucky’s family, though Bucky never gives up on finding uninterested girls to set Steve up with and shepherding him through disastrous dates. Steve had known since they were six that Bucky had his back, that he’d always fight for him; it’s just, until this, he’d not understood what always looked like in practice. And as in everything, he intended on making Bucky his example.

**[ &]**

The one time Natasha actually knocks on Steve’s door, the sound should have been an ominous _bang bang bang_ of doom. As it is, he’s only a little nonplussed to open it and find Natasha on the other side in her suit, a small gym bag over one shoulder, hair up off of her face in a ponytail.

She smiles, passes him the bag, and walks right on in.

“Uh.” Steve closes the door, following her to the table and putting the bag down on top of it, gesturing between it and her. “What, you moving in now? Don’t I have to ask you first?”

She shoots him an indulgent look and opens the bag, revealing two guns, a couple of knives, four thick wads of cash — US Dollars, Stirling, Yen and Euros, Steve thinks, based on colors, — some food packs, and what’s maybe clothes folded neatly at the bottom. And that’s just what Steve can see at a glance.

“You skipping town?” He asks, and in reply gets a toothy, cat-like grin. A big cat, though; a jaguar or something. Makes Steve almost want his shield.

“I’ve no immediate plans to, but you’re not wrong.” She pulls the guns out, shows him the safety’s on, that they’re modified — he’d even reckon they’re unregistered, as untraceable as it gets — and lines them up on Steve’s table. Then the knives — there are six, when she’s got them lined up, straight, sharp, in order of length. Two grenades, one smoke. “This is S.H.I.E.L.D training, the unofficial kind. Call it… Survival 101. I have a feeling you’ll be a natural.”

Next she pulls out three passports; Canadian, French, and Australian. Three drivers licenses to match. It’s then that Steve realizes they’ve got his face on them, and his lips thin but he notes the names: Philip Ackerley, Sebastian Coubert, and Anthony Graves. Next comes the money.

“Why…” He swallows, finding it’s hard to speak with a mouth that feels full of sawdust. “Why do I need this?”

Natasha doesn’t stop taking things out. Clothes, a modified first aid kit, three mobile phones, ammo. 

“You’re on a mission in Canada and someone on your side turns on you, kills your whole unit; frames you for it. S.H.I.E.L.D is coming for you, so are the local authorities. What do you do?”

Part of Steve wants to laugh, but there are two guns and six knives on his kitchen table that tell him not to. He considers Natasha, who seems to have stopped emptying the bag. He’s been feeling through strategical options in his head since she said “Canada.” It’s like it’s muscle memory, and he’s been flexing it every day since training started.

“Where in Canada?”

Natasha smiles, small, pleased he’s playing her game. “Northern British Columbia, twenty miles from the Alaskan border.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D issue equipment or my suit and shield?”

“S.H.I.E.L.D issue. Plus your shield, if you really must.” She rolls her eyes, irreverent as both a spy who doesn’t believe in having a target strapped to your back and as a child of Mother Russia, unimpressed by the Captain America legend. “Guns and knives, too, though, and grenades like these.” She points to them. “So?”

Steve looks at the grenades while he goes over it, then flashes her a shit-eating grin and says, “I call Tony, get him to come pick me up-“

“He’s in his workshop; doesn’t pick up.” She’s smiling, too, hip cocked, arms folded, definitely amused. This is a different Natasha than the one he usually sees in his apartment; this Natasha is mission ready, a naked blade rather than a sheathed one, but he likes her, too. He likes them both.

“Then I call Pepper-“

“She’s in Hong Kong and she’s in a meeting; she doesn’t answer either.”

“Then I call you.”

She blinks. Steve thinks she might even bite the inside of her cheek. That’s it, though, and then she shakes her head in mock-disappointment and says, “Well, tough shit, because I’m on a solo mission in Bahrain and can’t be reached. Also, where did you get this phone? Who’s tracing it? Because S.H.I.E.L.D are tracking calls to all your known associates and by the time you ring me they’ve already picked you up.” She leans forward over the table, eyes glittering. “Bye-bye Captain America; hello jail time.”

Steve cracks a smile. “Goddammit.” He folds his arms, mimicking her, thinking a little harder this time. “Alright, so I trek through the Canadian wilderness, borrow a car from a little old lady — little old ladies love me —“ (Natasha laughs and rolls her eyes,) “get over the border, and _then_ I come find you or Tony or, best yet, Pepper, and we go clear my name.”

“You’re so dumb for such a smart guy,” Natasha tells him, patting him on the cheek. “Okay, so, no. No. Once in a blue moon would that plan work. You’d get picked up at the border after the little old ladies’ son asks where her car is and he reports it stolen. Or, again, you’d be picked up when you got within ten miles of any of your friends.” She shakes her head, patting his cheek patronizingly again, and says, “You just rely on people too much.”

Steve rolls his eyes at her in return. “So what do you do in this situation?” 

“I have one of these,” she gestures to the bag. “I have lots of these, actually. Put me down anywhere in the world and I should be able to get to one within three days. Every S.H.I.E.L.D Ops agent is the same, it’s just not part of the official training.”

Steve surveys the contents of the bag again, imagining, instead of Natasha’s scenario, getting separated from the other Commandos while in the heart of Germany, trying to get back behind Allied lines. A bag like this would’ve been the kind of useful you’d kill for. 

“Why isn’t it?” He asks, picking up one of the guns to test its weight.

“S.H.I.E.L.D? Teach it’s recruits how to evade it?” She shakes her head. “Anyway, once you’re done at the Academy you ought to be at a standard to be able to do so anyway. And, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Ops agents tend to be… built from the same mold.” Steve raises an eyebrow and she adds, “We’re all paranoid to hell, is what I’m saying. Most of us don’t need a nudge in this direction.”

“Ah.” Steve puts the gun down, picking up the smallest knife to test the edge on a thread that’s coming out of his shirt. He wonders if he ought to say thank you. “You didn’t answer, though; what do you do?”

Natasha isn’t looking at him now, is tracing the blade of a medium sized knife.

“Most of my drops for these bags are in major cities, but I also carry one with me on all S.H.I.E.L.D missions. Discretely, obviously." She give him a look that dares him to think otherwise. "So I double back on myself, pick up the bag I brought, and suddenly I'm self-sustainable. They're expecting me to head for Vancouver, maybe Seattle or Portland if I can make the border, so instead I get across the border to Alaska by foot and head for Anchorage or Juno. I change my hair, wear layers to give myself a different build, and get myself stowed away on a boat to somewhere with a second bag waiting for me; it doesn't hurt to have options available, and what if I decide I need to be Italian and the ID I have claims that I am Russian, Ukrainian, or Irish?”

“And then?”

Still tracing the blades of her knives, Natasha says, “And then I remind S.H.I.E.L.D how much they disliked having me as an enemy, and reopen employment negotiations.”

Steve is surprised into a laugh, shaking his head, and has to ask, “Did this actually happen?”

Natasha smiles, looking genuinely amused. “Not to me; it was Hill, and she was in Egypt, not Canada.” She shrugs. “You don’t become Assistant Director at her age, or ever, without getting yourself noticed.”

Flummoxed, Steve runs a hand through his hair and breathes out, one big sigh to sum up every what the fuck feeling since the knock on his door.

“Yeah, if you’re ever on the run, the first thing you should do is shave your hair off,” Natasha tells him. She starts putting everything back into the bag methodically. “Look,” she says. “You keep this. Hide it, don’t tell me or anyone where. And at least think about making more.”

Steve nods, promises, “I will,” and helps her pack it up, shoving it under his bed for now once they’re done. He’s about to ask her how the hell you make a fake passport without S.H.I.E.L.D finding out when he turns around to find Natasha stripping off her suit down to her underwear and instead makes a squeaking sound of surprise he wants to hit himself over the head for (like Bucky would, if he could see this). Natasha throws him a look over her shoulder, her mouth saying come-hither, her eyes full of exasperation.

“I’m taking a shower, and when I come out there better be food. I think I want chow mien.”

Her bra falls to the floor just as she shuts the bathroom door behind her.

He knows it’s Natasha testing him, not God, but he still sends up a little prayer for patience, mercy, forbearance; thinks, _please, God,_ and leaves a wide berth around the bra lying on the floor in the hallway as he passes to go put his shoes on. He needs some fresh air, and going to the Chinese takeout place downstairs will be quicker than waiting for a delivery, anyway, he tells himself. 

He doesn’t think about how he’s running away from naked-showering-Natasha. It’s enough that his gut knows that he is.

**[ &]**

A week ago, Natasha had decided Steve doesn’t know enough about the modern American high school experience — vital, he’s sure, he tells her, and laughs when she flicks his ear and tells him to mind his elders. So she’d started making him watch Glee whenever she’s over. He thinks the common thread between the things Natasha decides Steve needs to watch are, a) there needs to be enough sex or talk about sex to make Steve blush, and, b) there needs to be dancing. (He’s actually kind of hooked on the Glee thing, and he is never telling Natasha; from the looks she keeps giving him as she eats her chow mein, all glinting-evil amusement, she knows anyway.) 

(She’s sitting on the couch with her bare legs in his lap, wearing his sweater and a pair of his underpants, which he can’t think about, he can’t.) 

(He’s pretty sure her bra’s still lying on his hallway floor.)

Fingers grip his shoulder as Natasha pulls herself up, holding chopsticks and noodles to Steve’s lips and saying, “Here, it’s really good. Try some.” Her grip shifts to the back of his neck, thumb soft against his pulse. Her eyes are hooded. Once he’s swallowed, he still has no idea what chow mien tastes like.

“Thanks, ’s good,” he lies to her, licking his lips, and she smiles, as if just for him, only ever for him, and drops her gaze to watch his tongue flick in and out. Glances back up at his eyes and catches him there.

He turns his head away.

She laughs against his cheek as she kisses it, leans back against the armrest of the couch again, watching him, always watching him. He closes his eyes for a second.

“Can we- Natasha.” She makes an “hmm?” sound, reaching for the remote to pause the show. “I’m just… trying to be your friend.”

Making an affirmative sort of noise, Natasha pokes Steve in the stomach with one of her toes. She tilts her head at him, asks, “does that mean we can’t have sex?” and laughs at him when he flushes over what’s probably all of his body and his brain just stops working for a minute, two. Until she pokes him again, this time with her finger and in the meat of his cheek; she’s pulled herself up by hanging onto his neck again, and her face is inches from his.

Steve closes his eyes, mutters, “God Almighty;” opens them again and says to her, “I mean, probably. I kind of think so.”

“Why?”

He stares at her. “Why?” He repeats. She nods, simple and straightforward and as always with this preternatural ability to make Steve feel like an idiot. “Because I respect you.”

“Then you’re already a step up from at least half of the men I’ve slept with.”

Steve tries not to splutter; in return, she does him the courtesy of keeping her laughter silent. “Then, because… I haven’t. Done that. S-slept with anyone. And I-“

“Wait.” Natasha sits straighter, face blank in what Steve thinks might actually be real surprise. “You haven’t had sex?” She pulls this face that’s a near-caricature of bemusement, gestures to, well, all of him, and asks, “But _how?_ ”

If Steve thought he were red before… But he brings his chin up, square, and looks at her calmly as he answers. He’s not ashamed. He doesn’t care. “I’ve been busy,” he tells her, and when she looks at him incredulously he adds in a smaller voice, “and I’m Catholic, okay? I’m not exactly waiting for marriage, but. It, you know, I wanted sex to mean something, whenever I do it.”

Her look softens.

“Steve, why does it have to be anything more than what it is?” Her arm is hooked around his neck, now, and their faces are so close. She tilts her head a little — there’s a chance she’s caught on to how Steve finds that… um, well, charming? Or adorable. But maybe she just does it, unselfconsciously. Maybe it’s really her. The way she bites her lip then is definitely to draw attention to it, though, and it works. She says, “Sex is a biological need; there’s no shame in it, no need for it to be anything more than a fun time between two people who respect each other.”

“I’m twenty-eight and I’m doing just fine,” Steve tells her, one eyebrow raised. “It’s hardly a biological need.”

Natasha smiles. “Okay, sure,” she says, raising one hand as if in surrender. Her other hand is still playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck. “But it can be pretty great. Look, we’re attracted to each other, we respect each other, and I think we’d be pretty excellent at it, together.” She brings her surrendering hand to his cheek. “But if you don’t want to, that’s okay too. I’m not going to suddenly start pretending I _don’t_ want to have sex with you, but you’ve been a perfect advertisement for self-control and self-denial so far, and I think you’ll be okay.”

He nearly laughs. Sure, yep, he’s been doing great.

Sighing, he realizes he’s leaning into her hand on his cheek. He closes his eyes and feels it a shiver across sensitive skin as she kisses his lips. For a moment, he freezes, thinking of Peggy, the last person he kissed, and then he unfreezes just like that, thinking how much Peggy wants him to live, how much Bucky would too, and he kisses back.

Natasha grins, eyebrows raised in question, when he pulls away.

“That can totally be a platonic lip-brush if you want,” she tells him. And, when he continues to look uncertain, she gently scratches at the back of his neck, says, “Hey, I have an itch. I can teach you to scratch it just the way I like it to be scratched, and you get to learn something new. Who loses in this situation?”

He knows with absolute certainty that he is not a week man, but everyone has a breaking point.

“Okay,” he says. And if the flicker of a smile he gets in return before he kisses her doesn’t reach Natasha’s eyes, he doesn’t notice.

They go to his bedroom holding hands; she lets him lay her out on the bed, directs him as he explores her body. He says thank you for the bag, for the Survival 101 lesson, full to bursting with some complicated friendship-trust-love-gratitude emotion when she smiles and pets his hair in reply, pulling him up from her neck to kiss him properly. 

He wonders if he’s always fallen — is that what’s happening? he’s not sure — for the people who look after him.

She grins, and laughs, and teaches him how to make it good for her as she makes it good for him. And he gets it, what she’s been telling him the whole time. She’s beautiful, and they’re beautiful together.

And he feels _happy_.

**[ &]**

Natasha leaves right after they finish — gets up to go freshen up in the restroom and it's just two minutes later that Steve wonders; thinks, _oh, I should have known better,_ and goes to check on her. Hopes he'll find her brushing her teeth, still naked, beautiful, and that he’ll see her in the bathroom mirror and she'll smile at him with her eyes. Let him press up behind her and hold her hips in his hands. That she’ll turn and kiss him over her shoulder with minty breath and laugh at the face he pulls.

The bathroom is empty. The window is open, wide, which he takes to be a classic, Natasha-style _fuck you_.

He goes back to bed but doesn't sleep. The weight of loneliness Natasha had lifted drops down on him with all of the old weight, plus an extra special wallop courtesy of good old gravity. What goes up, must come down.

The sun's coming up when he decides he should have known he'd screw this up. He should have tried harder to be her friend. She’d watched and weighed him; as a person, a colleague, a comrade and a friend. If it was all a test, then tonight he failed it, and all while she'd made him feel like he was top of the class.

It's hardly fair, how good it was, when it's probably cost him the first real relationship he made in this century.

It’s hardly fair, how dumb he was.

He doesn’t blame her. He should have known all along. He knows it’s his fault.

Eventually, he gives up on sleep, goes for his morning run, and finally texts Natasha at 15:47, so says his phone, saying: **i respect and admire you as much as anyone i've ever met. i am so sorry.**

It's a good job he's not expecting a reply. That knock on the door was just a portent of doom, after all.

**[ &]**

A long time ago — for all it feels like yesterday, when Steve closes his eyes — Steve meets Peggy, falls head over heals for her, grows a foot or so, and is so relieved he’s not… that it’s not just Bucky, that he can feel this way about someone else. A lady, too. It’s relief for all different reasons.

He thinks about loving her after the war, too, gets a flash of it when she pulls him down to kiss when he’s about to jump on Schmitt’s plane. Thinks about growing old with her, loving her when she’s old and wrinkled and barely has the strength to hold his hand anymore. He thinks she probably knows how desperate he is, thinks she wants him to have something, a kiss, tying him to here (the 1945 version) when he’s staring death in the face. He lets her down.

But seventy years later he does love her when she’s old. Loves her when she holds his hand in weak fingers, watching him with strong eyes.

He loves her even when she squeezes his hand, laughs at him, and says, “Steve Rogers, you are still so stupid with women.”

It’s a good day for her, so good that they’re sitting outside in the garden, drinking tea and eating the fruit loaf Peggy’s daughter makes and brings out to the home for her with good English butter. And somehow Steve had ended up telling her everything. It’s not as though he couldn’t; Peggy is just as aware as he is that Natasha is just about Steve’s only other real personal connection in this world, and she asks about her whenever Steve comes to visit. And the thing about Peggy is, no matter how many years line her face or grey her hair, she will always be Agent Carter. She’ll always be Steve’s best girl, the one who can look at him and see right through him.

Peggy is a good lady, though, even if getting old has left her with a wicked, evil sense of humor Steve doesn’t remember from back in the 40s, so she pets his hair when he puts his head in his hands and says, plaintive, “I know, I know.”

“It is not your fault.” Peggy’s fingers wrap around Steve’s wrists to guide his hands away from his face. She thumbs his chin, tilting his face up to look at her. “It is not your fault.”

“It is.” Steve takes her hand back, squeezing it as lightly as he can, though he’s still holding it with desperation. He gives her a look he knows has to be sad, full of guilt. “I knew,” he confesses, “I knew she was testing me the whole time. I should never have said yes.”

The sympathy in Peggy’s eyes shouldn’t be as much of a comfort as it is. She keeps telling him he needs to make friends with people his age. As in most things, she’s not wrong.

“All right, yes,” Peggy concedes. “You slipped up; you failed her test this time. But Steve-“ She breaks off to cough, clutching his hand in hers even as she brings it to her throat, bracing herself until she can stop. With his free hand Steve brings her tea to her lips, watching as the gratefully sips. Under control, she thanks him and goes on: “my darling, there can be other tests, other opportunities for you to prove yourself. Whether for her benefit or for anyone else’s.”

When he shakes his head it’s not in disagreement. 

“I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this if you’d just marry me like I keep asking,” he reminds her, an old argument by now. As always, she laughs, letting him kiss her hand.

“Don’t change the subject. Though that reminds me, I’ve been meaning to introduce you to a niece of mine; she’s just moved back after spending a few years in the Middle East. You need to be with someone your own age.” She pauses, looking down at her hand in his. Her smile, when it comes, is full of wistful pride. “I am so glad that you tried,” she tells him — he suddenly has to try very hard not to cry. “And- and that you felt that you could come to me. As always, my life is better for knowing you.”

“Mine too,” he manages to say. He swallows hard and draws himself together. “And if you won’t be my wife, then you are my best friend.” He wants to say more, wants to say that he’s glad it doesn’t hurt her for him to come to her with his problems with other women; that she’s his rock, his safe-haven; that he still loves her and always will. That he’s glad she lived while he was sleeping even as she’s glad to watch him living now. That she’s his guardian angel. And as a rule he tries to tell her everything he wants her to know, now, while he still can, but for now he fixes her with a stubborn look and says, “Anyway, Pegs, you are my own age.”

Her smile is indulgent even as her eyes try to be stern. “Not in the way that counts,” she tells him, just exactly the way she always does. But she must see something sadder or lonelier or more lost in him than when they normally have this conversation, because she switches their grip so that their fingers are laced together and she tells him, “If I were guaranteed another hundred, or fifty, or ten years to live, and if I were told I’d have my brain for all of that, then yes, I’d marry you now. Even as wrinkled as I am.”

“You’re beautiful,” Steve tells her, and lets her smile like she maybe doesn’t believe him because, he understands her. He remembers being ten and Mrs Barnes joking with his Ma that they should try to set Steve up with Bucky’s oldest little sister; remembers telling Mrs Barnes and Ma and Bucky that he wasn’t ever getting married because he didn’t want to make anyone sad when he died. He’d just come out of a bought of pneumonia that’d nearly killed him and it’d been weighing on his mind. Bucky had looked at him like Steve was already a ghost, and then his face had crumpled, eyes going not just sad but devastated, the first time he’d ever considered Steve’s relative mortality and frailty. Bucky had eventually gentle-punched Steve’s shoulder and told him, “you don’t get to die just like that, Rogers,” and that’d mostly been that, though he always got that same look whenever Steve got sick.

He’s sure his face goes just the same, contemplating Peggy’s death. 

But he’d never wanted to see that look in the faces of his loved ones, and he’s sure she doesn’t, either. She’s here now. That matters.

He coughs, awkward, and asks, “So, do you know any good places to leave an emergency get-out-of-dodge bag in this city?” and laughs in surprise as Peggy grins wickedly and says, “ah, so someone taught you to think like a spy, finally,” and begins listing half a dozen places between her home and Steve’s apartment alone.

**[ &]**

Steve fills a Natasha-devoid month with running, visiting Peggy, training, working his way through his catch up list, and going away with the other trainees for a final field training op. No matter how much he does or how exhausted he is when he gets into bed at night, he still can’t shake the feeling that everything is just absent of something Natasha-sized. She’d snuck up into his life and now that she’s gone he’s not quite sure what to do.

After field training, Steve is officially made a S.H.I.E.L.D Specialist and a team leader, but it’s not until Fury brings him in to give him the final decision on who he’ll be working with and on what that he realizes that his… er, history, if it’s not too early to think of it like that, with Natasha might be more of an issue than either of them had thought. He walks out of the meeting where he’s been told he’s going to be working with S.T.R.I.K.E and other Specialists under his command, not with regular agents, with a new determination to track down Natasha. He has to try to clear the air, apologize, or at least give her a little warning.

She finds him first, arms crossed, watching him impassively as he walks out of the elevator and stops still at the sight of her.

“Rogers.” She nods to him, cocks her head to the side and gestures to the practice range door in invitation. “Let’s spar.”

Last time Steve wronged a woman, she shot at him. Things really don’t ever change.

They’re squaring off against each other on the mats before Natasha says anything else. “I take it Fury told you,” she says. Steve nods, and nods again when she asks if he’s ready. 

He blocks a series of lightning quick strikes and almost manages to flip her, then, as they circle each other, he says, “I was just coming to find you. I wanted to apologize.”

In answer, her foot connects with the side of his head. He’s so busy blocking, attacking, shifting, that he barely logs it when she says, “I’m not asking for an apology,” and then with a kick that almost connects with his groin and an elbow which does hit his throat, she tells him, “you’re not getting one from me, either.”

Steve heaves in the breath she knocked out of him, stepping into her space rather than away and managing to get her hands twisted behind her for half a second before she uses his grip of her to swing up over his head and come down in a choke position. He has to go for her eyes to get away, but doesn’t connect.

For a moment they’re on opposite sides of the mat again, circling slowly. Natasha seems to consider him as a cat would an injured sparrow, but after a moment she tells him, “I need to know that we can work together. That you won’t treat me any differently than anyone else.” He opens his mouth to ask “have I ever?” but she cuts him off with a flurry of blows that force him to really focus on the cues of her body to block. Circling again, breathing a little hard, Natasha adds, “If I’d known we’d be working together so often, I wouldn’t have had sex with you. At the time, it seemed harmless.”

And Steve knows that’s not true. It wasn’t harmless, either in planning or in action, and he knows she’d been playing him all along, trying to get the measure of him. Though she’s probably also been telling the truth all along, about the want of it all being about respect and helping each other out. Natasha just builds trust differently to anyone else he’s ever met, and doesn’t mind tearing it down when it fails her. Probably because she doesn’t believe it can help her better than suspicion can.

(And, in a way, she has been uncharacteristically honest with him from start to finish. He’s just not sure she knows — no, well, she definitely _knows_ , deep down, that she’s been leaving him a trail of breadcrumbs to follow the whole time, — but he’s not sure she’s let herself realize how honest she’s been with him.

He’s not sure if he should point it out.)

“I will treat you differently, Natasha.” He tells her. She doesn’t react, doesn’t look hurt or unsurprised or anything else, but he’d be shocked himself if she let him read her now. He gives her a lopsided smile, hands up in what she’s pausing to consider as both surrender and readiness, fists half formed. He thinks he’d reach out to reassure her with a pat on the arm if she were anyone else under his command, or if it were before they slept together. For her, the smile will have to do the speaking. In this moment she doesn’t trust him, and he only trusts her when she trusts him back. That’s the thing; trust isn’t blind. 

“But not,” he makes sure to look right at her, not to blink too much. “Not because we… um, you know.” She gives him a look, says, “fucked?” and rolls her eyes when he makes a face and says, pointedly, “ _Slept together_. You’re not like anyone else at S.H.I.E.L.D, so no, I won’t treat you like everyone else. But if I work with Clint, I won’t treat him like anyone else, either. It’d be a waste of your abilities if I did, and that’d make fools of both of us.”

Again, her answer is to throw her body at him in combat. They fight pressed up against each other for several seconds before Steve manages to throw and pin her, only to find she squirms out from under him after jabbing him hard in the armpit, somehow momentarily deadening his arm, and throwing him over so his head cracks hard off the floor where they’ve come to the edge of the mat.

On getting up, though, she gives him her back as she walks away, pulling out her hair tie and picking up a bottle of water. She swigs it, walking back to him. Offers him a hand; then, once he’s on his feet, she offers him the water.

“You know,” She taps a finger to her bottom lip in mock-thought. For once, he thinks, she’s not trying to ensnare him; she just does, effortlessly. The smile she gives him, though, that’s more important; it’s small at her lips but reaches right to her eyes, and it feels like the first time she’s truly being honest, truly trying to build something with him. “There’s this girl. Jenny or something. She’s in Science. Brown hair, British. I think you should ask her out for coffee.”

Steve laughs, once, surprised, then tells her “no. Thanks, but no,” and lets her walk away with nothing more than a shrug and an “it’s your loss,” because she’s still smiling just the same as she walks away.

For that small sign that maybe one day they’ll be friends, he’d put up with so much of her dumb sense of humor, and she can set him up with every single woman in S.H.I.E.L.D. He’ll deal with it.

Which, it turns out, is a good job, because he has to.

**[ &]**

In the six months between sparing and going on the run together before taking down S.H.I.E.L.D, they run close to thirty missions together, but Natasha never once shows up in Steve’s apartment. Every time he goes on Netflix, it tries to recommend him Glee and something horrifying looking called High School Musical, but instead he watches baseball and catches up on movies which have won Oscars; stuff Natasha always pinned him with a look and said “no” to. 

But she tells awful jokes and tries to set him up on dates with other women, and if it’s not like they’re friends then they’re at least friendly colleagues, ones who almost always work well together and who like each other. It’s not as though he’s pining, either, except maybe for her company on his couch and sitting on his kitchen bench. 

Then Fury gets shot in Steve’s living room the day after Steve had realized (or, maybe more accurately, re-realized) that people like Fury, like Natasha, are always going to keep secrets from people like him; that Fury and Natasha don’t believe in trust.

Less than a day later, Natasha is kissing him on an escalator, making Steve forget the very competent, ruthless agents on their tail. Then, in the truck, she asks him, “Was that your first kiss since…?” and makes some quip about him practicing, and all he can think to say is: “Believe it or not, it’s a little hard to find someone with shared life experience.”

Its crazy, how they can go from him shoving her into a wall in the morning to her ribbing him about not kissing well that afternoon, to her asking if he’d trust her to save his life, the next day, and him honestly saying yes; saying, “I would now.” Because, after all that, maybe he can trust Natasha even when he’s not so sure she trusts anyone at all; maybe trust has to be blind for it to ever start to be built.

And there are a lot of other crazy things that happen between that moment and the one beside Nick Fury’s empty grave, things that have rocked Steve’s entire foundations (Bucky, Bucky, S.H.I.E.L.D, but mostly Bucky). But what happens when Natasha kisses his cheek in a slow press of soft lips that pull into a a slyly lopsided smile, that’s not crazy; Steve’s hoped it was inevitable since he first entered his new apartment a little less than a year ago to find her stretched out on his couch.

That smile of Natasha’s? Finally says: _I am your friend._

With Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov at his back, the world will fall before him and they cannot fail to, finally, sixty-nine years late, bring home Bucky Barnes.

**Author's Note:**

> For info on the series chronology and which fics can be read as stand alone, see [the series notes](http://archiveofourown.org/series/158831).
> 
> Warnings:
> 
> \- the dub-con is a conversation between two characters leading up to a fade-to-black sex scene; it is not intended to be dub-con and verbal consent to the sex is given, but the conversation itself might be triggering if it’s a sensitive thing for you; there's also some subsequent and problematic self-blame for the consequences of the sex on the part of the POV character which I couldn't address in this fic because, er, it's from his POV, and it's important that he feels that way for other parts of this verse; however, the sex itself is enthusiastically consented to at the time, even if it the POV character knows it’s a bad idea and regrets it after.
> 
> \- the bi/homo-phobia happens in 1941 and thus is period typical; one character imagines another saying "queer" and “pervert” as slurs, and there is a scene in which one character is rejected by their unofficially-adoptive family because of their sexuality; in the modern day one character then assumes that this same character is straight.
> 
> \- there is discussed and contemplated character death, but no actual character death.
> 
> \- I'm a Brit and this fic has not been American-picked.
> 
>  
> 
> Any questions or if you just want to say hey, look me up on [twitter](https://twitter.com/misprinting) or [tumblr](http://misprinting.tumblr.com/). I'm happy to answer anything.


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